Forever Yours
©2025 Elder Road Books - Lynnwood WA
Chapter 34: Personal Assistant
LUKE AND ISOBEL got married. The ceremony and mass were at one-thirty in the afternoon, which gave most of the wedding party a chance to get past their hangovers. Henry had never had that experience before and vowed he’d never have it again. He’d thrown up as soon as he woke up and then ordered coffee and aspirin from room service.
It came with a side of a bloody mary, which the delivery boy said came from the groom’s father. Henry was surprised Paul had managed to get a drink delivered to Henry and presumably the rest of the wedding party without anyone raising an eyebrow about ages. He hesitated a minute and then took a drink of the spicy concoction. He didn’t detect any alcohol in it, so assumed it was a virgin cocktail. He drank it down.
He drank a cup of black coffee as he stood in the shower with the hot water beating on his back and then finally managed to wake up and finish the process. He wondered a little at why the towels in the bathroom were all damp and then realized he’d taken a shower in the middle of the night after he and Izzy...
That memory came as a shock. She was crazy. But he had to be just as crazy to have participated. No matter who’d been with Luke last night, Henry was going to have a shit-load of guilt to carry with him.
He met Luke and the other groomsmen in the hotel restaurant. Chastity met them there. She was the only one dressed in her tux already. They went to the cathedral where a room was prepared for them to change in. There was a strict separation of the bride’s party and the groom’s party. Luke wouldn’t see his bride until she walked down the aisle with her father.
Both families were well connected, so more than three hundred people attended the wedding. When the music finally started playing, the long day really began. While the wedding party stood facing the altar, there were songs, prayers, scripture readings, and a ten minute sermon by the priest before they even got to the part of addressing the bride and groom. Then there was a statement of intent, an exchange of consent, a blessing and giving of rings. This was followed by a profession of faith, a prayer, and the celebration of the Eucharist. Henry identified it as a communion in protestant terms, though he’d never partaken of one. Those in the congregation who were not Catholic were also not invited to participate. Then another prayer, another song and finally, the priest pronounced them husband and wife. They got to kiss.
That still wasn’t the end. There was another prayer, a blessing, and finally the dismissal. The organ in the cathedral boomed out a recessional and then they finally got out to the receiving line where everyone passed the wedding party and said congratulations. That was where Lisa finally caught up with Henry and took a place just behind him. All told it took an hour.
It wasn’t over for the wedding party, though. They filed back into the sanctuary where the official photographer set and posed photos until the priest finally told them they had to leave so he could prepare the four-thirty mass.
Everyone had left and headed for the hotel banquet room by then, where people started drinking about four o’clock and were well past the hors d’oeuvres and ready for the banquet. Fortunately for everyone, the wedding party was seated and dinner was served at five-thirty.
The party went well into the night. Henry managed to separate himself from Brittany, the maid of honor, and rejoined Lisa, who sat with Henry’s parents. Chastity had long-since joined them. It was after ten when Luke and Isobel left to go to the honeymoon suite. Henry, Lisa, and Chastity considered that to be clearance that they could all leave the party, too.
With the chaos brought on by the impending wedding out of the way, the following week brought even more pressure. Everything in the office was packed up and they started transporting things to the new office late in the week. Ray declared the contract work to be finished and Chastity, with Darrel, walked through the new office, accepted the keys, and called the movers to deliver their furniture and equipment.
At the same time, Henry was in his study on a Zoom call with Gene Grey of Grey’s Analysis.
“Henry, welcome back to our podcast. You’ve made quite a splash with another new product since we talked previously. Tell me about the new Open Cloak Search Engine,” Gene said when they got started.
“Personally, I’m very excited about this release, Gene. I’ve been using experimental renditions of this search engine for a couple of years. I routinely get better results from it than from any commercial search engine,” Henry explained.
“Why? What is so different about this?”
“Open Cloak Search is not subject to any kind of advertising or sponsored links,” Henry said. “It works in plain English at the moment, so users of other languages will have to wait a while before we get to a version as robust in other languages. But this is the first search engine that operates as a resident application on your computer.”
“Wait. Aren’t most search engines an application on your computer?”
“Sort of,” Henry said. “As soon as you launch the search engine, it attaches to the index managed in the cloud by the manufacturer. That’s why when you search for something, you see ‘sponsored links’ displayed first. You see, the manufacturers make their money that way. They give you the app for free and collect revenue based on the number of sponsored links users click on. In order to increase that revenue stream, the company collects information about what you click on and all your search terms so they can push more targeted advertising toward you. Open Cloak doesn’t do that.”
“We talked about the dangers of having everything in the cloud during your last interview and you gave some pretty compelling evidence. Are you saying Open Cloak Search user data is not stored in the cloud?”
“Let me clarify. When you search with one of the big engines, the information on your searches is uploaded from one or more cookies the search engine can access to determine all that browsing history. The more you use your browser, the more information that is stored. These cookies are among those that the Open Cloak Optimizer doesn’t interfere with because they are used regularly. We get rid of abandoned or inactive cookies, but don’t disturb the way you currently work. With Open Cloak Search, your personal data is stored in the program file itself where an AI compiles the information and uses it to predict the most useful information for you. But that information is never sent to a corporate server in the cloud. It is used ... digested, if you will ... by the search engine but no personal information is ever collected by the ubiquitous consumer data engines.”
“What else is different? We get rid of sponsored links. Then is the content pretty much the same as any other search engine?”
“Not exactly. Corporations use what is referred to as SEO, or search engine optimization, to influence where their content is positioned in search results. Conceptually, it’s a great thing that speeds up search results because the engine doesn’t need to look at the whole page it is displaying. It only needs to look at header information. Unfortunately, that header information and other SEO techniques can be manipulated by corporations. In fact, there is an industry devoted to SEO. They broaden the number of keywords, links, and link backs to bring what may be completely irrelevant sites to the top of the search results.”
“Henry, if you don’t use the keywords or SEO, how does your search engine get good results?” Gene asked.
“That’s where the real secret sauce comes into play,” Henry said. “Our search engine will be a little slower when it’s first installed. That’s because the built-in AI has to learn how you work and the kind of information you are likely to want. Since the AI resides on your personal computer, it has access to everything you have there. It will learn what you are interested in and how you work from more than your search results and clicks.”
“Whoa! The search engine is going to what? Catalog everything on my computer?” Gene asked.
“Essentially. That is what we build its training wall on. You see, when you use an AI search engine, it builds the training wall on a broad selection of information, the bulk of which has nothing at all to do with what you are searching for. Open Cloak is your personal assistant and the first and foremost thing you want from a personal assistant is a non-disclosure agreement. None of that information is passed on.”
“A personal assistant,” Gene said. “So, large search engine AIs reveal millions of pages of links. What do you get from Open Cloak Search?”
“Back in November, I started a search with a commercial search engine by asking just ‘Where to.’ I got 186,000,000 results. Now what I was hunting for was ‘Where to vote,’ so I completed the search. By the way, the first result that had to do with polling places was on the third page of results in the first search. That yielded only 17,700,000 results. But after wading through page after page of results, I still didn’t see anything that was specifically about where to vote in the area where I live—Pittsburgh, PA. Of course, getting more specific and asking ‘Where to vote in Pittsburgh,’ yielded only 6,930,000 results and, in fact, the tenth link on the first page of results was a list of polling places in the greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area.”
“Okay, so you got the result?”
“Yes, but why did I have to be so specific and still not get the result as the number one link? Now keep in mind, I conducted this search on November first. Election day was the second. Why didn’t I get the ‘where to vote’ results with the first two words? Open Cloak Search, your personal assistant, knows the date on my computer, knows my location, and knows I’ve been politically active through donations I made to my preferred candidates. When I entered a search for ‘Where to,’ I received an immediate page of ten results and the first—the very first—result on the page was the list of polling places in the greater Pittsburgh area.”
“What if you wanted to know where to go on vacation?” Gene asked.
“Well, the AI wasn’t finished. It gave me a page of ten results based on what it knew about me instantly, but then it kept building search results. Another page of results displayed more voter information, including the county voter pamphlet with the full list of what was on the ballot and statements by each candidate, qualifications to vote, and voter assistance numbers. The next batch of results starting about halfway down page three, was ‘where to take my date.’ That’s something I’ve looked up frequently. The results, once again were specific to my location and the time of year. Ultimately, I had a total of a little over 17,000 results that covered a plethora of ‘where to’ information.”
“So, how far did you have to look before you found where to go on vacation?” Gene asked.
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